What Is Marriage?

“Because of the hardness of your hearts, Moses wrote you this commandment that from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother, and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, man must not separate.” Jesus is confronting the diminished sense of marriage, the corrupted sense of marriage that has crept in, and has become firmly entrenched, and is supported by the powerful people and institutions of that society. But Jesus did not accept this, we humans often diminish what God is creating, but Jesus confronts this, and He says, it’s because of the hardness of our hearts that this has happened. And then He says, going back to creation, He says, “what God has joined.” So that this union of men and women is not something merely human. But Jesus says, what God has joined, it doesn’t just say what a man and a woman have joined, He says, what God has joined. So inviting us to realize that there’s a divine action in this human act. And which they become He says, one flesh. And that’s especially true in that in the child who results from that union. And He says, Man, but not separated. So He’s confronting the understanding of His time. And some historians have said that this is the most revolutionary for human history of all Jesus teachings, because of how it impacted all of society, which began to follow it. And it took time and a lot of effort. It’s an ongoing, difficult battle, it’s still going on today. But when it was accepted, it was transformative for everybody, but especially benefited women, and especially children, who were the ones who most suffered from this action from this understanding. And it’s not by chance that the gospel today began with this teaching on marriage, and then ends with an encounter with Jesus with the children. Jesus is defending those who are most defenseless in our society. And we know this question of marriage, marriage, in so many ways, is a source of controversy today, and powerful forces are at the root of this controversy, changing what marriage is when changing the legal definition of marriage, and telling us that the debate is over. And anyone who resists is old fashioned, and bigoted, and on the wrong side of history. And so, it’s important on such an important matter, not to settle for just slogans, and sound bites, like love is love. And I should be free to love whoever I choose. You are free to love whoever you choose. In fact, God commands you to love all your neighbors. The question is not are you free to love someone? The question is, who should we be able to marry? It’s a different question. And so, there are many different ideas about this. People have different ideas about who they want to marry, some would like to marry someone of their same sex. Some would like to marry several persons. And that’s also been a common practice in certain cultures. Some would like to even marry a sibling or a close family member. Another practice has been people marrying a very like a man marrying a very young girl, or girl who’s 9,10 even younger, and that that’s happened in history. And that’s accepted in certain cultures. For us that shocking. That’s been done. And I’ve even read accounts of person who wanted to marry or who did marry a tree or another married their pet. Or and these are real accounts. I mean, at least they’re in the news a person marrying a doll and another person wanted to marry themselves. So, people have all sorts of different ideas about who they would like to marry. So, the key question is, what is marriage? That’s the question which needs to be asked and which has been lost. What is marriage? And there’s two very different views of what is marriage. So, we’re gonna look at these two different views, and look a little bit at why marriage is important. And then which one of these two different views best fills the essential qualities of marriage. And so my perspective today in this little homily, is not going to be so it because we’re addressing questions which affect our society, the laws, and the public policy in our society. So today, my point of view will be more a human point of view, focused on what human reason can understand about marriage. So not just based on faith, or religion, or scripture. So that this is something a discussion we could have with people of no religious faith, though faith gives us a deeper understanding. And what I’ll be sharing with you today, a lot of it, I’m following. What is that brand, a guy called Brandon Vogt, has a site called Claritas U, that if you want to see more what this is, and so I’ll have to summarize it, because it’s a lot of material. I’ll try not to be too long. But so, the first question is, what is marriage? And there are two different viewpoints. One, we could call the conjugal view, which is the traditional historical view. And it is the view which the overwhelming majority of people throughout history have embraced.  So, it’s, and I give you a little definition, marriage is the institution which unites a man and a woman to each other, and to any children born from their union. So, I’ll say that, again, this is the view that sees marriage as the institution which unites a man and a woman to each other, and to any children born of their union. So, I think that’s very helpful to even to memorize that. And so, this conjugal view is, it’s called conjugal because of the conjugal act, in this view of marriage is fulfilled, or consummated, but what’s known as the conjugal Act, the sexual union, by which a man and a woman coordinate their whole selves towards a shared end, procreation. And it’s comprehensive, because it involves the whole of the two persons, their bodies, their minds, their hearts, uniting towards a single goal. It’s the only biological act that requires two persons to complete. And sometimes, of course, it results in children, but not always. Yet it is an act, which is to unify the spouses, unifies the spouses in a special way. So that’s the conjugal view. And then the other view of marriage of what marriage is, we could call it the revisionist, revisionist or a revised view. It sees marriage as the public recognition of a committed relationship between two adults for their own fulfillment. The public recognition of a committed relationship between two adults for their own fulfillment. And in this view, marriage has no special connection to children or procreation. It sees marriage as essentially an intense emotional bond that is about romance  love and mutual affection. And its primary purpose is personal fulfillment. So, it’s about identifying your number one relationship. And this view, it’s up to the partners to decide whether to have kids whether to be sexually exclusive, or how long the marriage lasts, because again, marriage is only about personal fulfillment. And so, it can be adjusted or even ended when it stops fulfilling. So, if the conjugal view is correct, then it’s easy to see why marriage can only involve one man and one woman. Because that’s the only relationship that can participate in this comprehensive union of the conjugal act.  It’s the only type of union capable of producing children. But if the revisionist view is correct, and marriage is just about adult fulfillment, then practically any relationship can be recognized as a marriage. You can have a marriage between a man and a woman, two men, two women, three people, large groups, it doesn’t matter. The revisionist view is extremely popular today. It’s the one championed in the whole industry of movies, media, books, TV, and even in many of our schools. So, it’s not surprising that many people support this view. they’ve accepted the revisionist view of marriage. And so, which of these two views is correct? And which of them best serves the public interest? Because marriage is not just a personal question, but it’s also a question which affects our society, and involves the public interest. Why? Why doesn’t the government just ignore the question and get out of the whole marriage business together? What does government have to do with marriage? Why does government spend so much energy on marriage? Why doesn’t government legislate about other types of relationship the way it does about marriage? For instance, governments don’t legislate friendships. The government doesn’t tell you can or cannot be friends with a certain person. You don’t have to file for a friendship license. But governments do care about marriage. Why? Why is government concerned about this type of relationship? Because obviously, there’s a lot of laws and policy about it. There’s sometimes special marriage benefits to our government, which try to promote a healthy marriage culture. Why? And there’s one key reason why government and public policy should involve marriage, because of children. The government needs to care about marriage, because it needs to care about children. The government isn’t interested in our love lives, or our sexual preferences, or our most intense romantic relationship. But it needs to care about marriage because it needs to care about children. Society depends on children, for society to continue, it needs healthy, productive new generations of children. That’s why the government makes laws about marriage or should be to ensure that children are united to their mother and father wherever possible, which gives them the best chance for success in life. Right now, we’ve just begun the month of October, which the Church observes as the amount of respect for life. And this is one of the key elements have a true respect for life, respect for marriage and how it affects children, the most vulnerable. For the government being in a marriage business helps children in two ways. First of all, it ensures that children are raised by the mother or father, who conceive them. Every child longs to know his mother and father, and where possible to be raised by them, and marriage cements that bond. Secondly, marriage is the best way to ensure that parents stick together, even during tough times. With other relationships, it’s fine to have temporary bonds, but with the marriage relationship, permanent matters. Because of the children, ideally, men and women need to stick together for the sake of the children. without marriage, sexual relationships tend to become temporary. Fathers are especially likely to leave, forcing mothers to raise children on their own. Obviously, this is not good for women or their children.  When possible, a child should have both parents. So, marriage definitely matters. And so now we want to look at three key elements of marriage to help understand which of the two views correspond to these elements. So, these are elements or traits of marriage that almost everybody agrees on. And these three key elements are normal and necessary for true marriages. They are three the three are permanence, fidelity, and monogamy, permanence, fidelity and monogamy.  Permanence…most of us agree that marriage ideally, is for life. When you commit to marrying someone, you commit to stay together until death do us part. We all know that divorce is rampant, and many marriages fall apart. But we usually don’t highlight divorces as good things. Even if we sometimes fail to live up to the ideal that’s the goal. But if marriage is meant to be permanent, which are the two visions of marriage, best accounts for this goal. On the conjugal view, it’s easy to see why permanent is important. If marriage is about uniting two spouses so that they can procreate and raise children, permanent is crucial. Children need stability, and spouses need the assurance that their partner is in it until the end, but they’re not going to back out when things get tough. But on the revisionist view, marriage has no special connection to kids. And it’s just an intense emotional or romantic bond. romantic feelings come and go. If the revisionist view is correct, and that’s all that marriage is, then why stay married, when the feelings go away? Why does marriage need to be permanent? The revisionist view gives no reason to think that marriage must last for life. So only the conjugal view explains the fact that marriage should be permanent. So, what about fidelity? By fidelity, we mean faithfulness, specifically sexual faithfulness, when two people get married, they almost always pledge whether explicitly or implicitly, to be sexually faithful to each other. And the sign is how hurt and betrayed people feel when they discover that their partner has been unfaithful. Marriage is supposed to be sexually exclusive. But why? In the conjugal view it makes sense. Since marriage is about uniting to create and raise children, it’s obvious that we should commit sexually to only one spouse. If you slept around with lots of people, you would risk having children with different partners outside of marriage. And that would create a whirlwind of problems for both you and your spouse, and especially the children that result. Sexual fidelity ensures that spouses only have children with each other within the committed bond of marriage. But according to the revisionist view, why is fidelity important? If marriage is basically about personal fulfillment? What’s wrong with spouses sleeping around? If they feel that’s what personally fulfills them? So only the conjugal view can explain the reason for fidelity. And finally, monogamy. monogamy refers to the fact that married people have only one spouse. But why is that the case? And the conjugal view, marriage can only be between one man and one woman. Because only that pair can unite sexually in the type of an act that produces children. Therefore, marriage ties a person to only one partner. three, or four or five people cannot share a conjugal or comprehensive union. But on the revisionist view, there’s no good reason to limit it to two people. Why can’t three or more people share an intense bond? And the revisionist view? There’s no good answer. There’s a lot of people pushing right now in our society for polygamy. So we’ve seen that these three key elements that they’re best explained, and really only explained by the conjugal view of marriage, the revisionist view does not support them. So, people do have the right to love whomever they want. But the question is, do I have the right to marry whoever I want, and that depends on what marriage is. So, the effort today is not to expand marriage, it’s to redefine marriage, that’s what’s happened in our society, marriage has been changed from one definition to another. You know, our societies become very sensitive to nature, to respecting what is natural, ecology. And so that should be especially true for the human person, and for our human body, respect, what is natural, the natural law that God has placed in the human body. So, I can’t go into all the questions here, for instance, this Brandon Vogt goes into the trends in the situation, the couples who aren’t able to have children? I won’t try to go into that because of length. But just to summarize what we covered today. So, these two key questions of what marriage is, we look at two different views, is the revisionist view that marriage is the public recognition of this marriage is only the public recognition of a committed relationship between two adults for their fulfillment.  Or is marriage, the conjugal view of the institution which unites a man and a woman to each other, and to any children born of that union. And so only one of these, the conjugal view, fulfills the essential qualities of permanence, fidelity, and monogamy in marriage. So, we’re in a marriage crisis in our society, even worse than that in the Gospel today, the hardness of heart, the effects of sin are affecting marriage more and more. And so, what Jesus is calling us to is very challenging for all of us, very challenging. But it’s calling for a great life-giving renewal of society. It’s very challenging, but you know, our society is being challenged in many ways, we’re being challenged to be very attentive to COVID, we are being challenged to redefine marriage, and so forth. So Jesus is calling to a challenging thing, which is to renew our society, in a proper understanding, profound understanding, the challenge and understanding of marriage. It’s based on the dignity of the human person. And what that says about the relationship between the husband and wife, and the welcoming protection and loving support of the most vulnerable of children. And it reaches to the very foundation of what love truly is, and the meaning of our life, a life of self-giving and self-sacrifice. So, it’s not an easy path. But it’s the great path of eternal happiness. And it’s the path rooted in His sacrificial love. So, we come to Mass all of us sinners, all of us having fallen short of this idea, we know that our society is very wounded. And all of us are wounded in this, but we come to Jesus,  the Lord of mercy, to receive the grace and mercy needed for the renewal of ourselves for the healing and renewing of ourselves and our relationships, and our marriage. And so, with our Blessed Mother, and with St. Joseph in this year of St. Joseph, Jesus, we trust in You.  Amen.